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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27358891">Nor Yet a Floating Spar</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone'>standalone</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [20]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Les Misérables - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>2020 US Presidential Election, Coffee, Elections, M/M, Waiting</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 02:48:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,211</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27358891</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The only cure for time is time.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [20]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/610273</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>43</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Nor Yet a Floating Spar</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The anger and fear have been easy. The harder part, of course, was working up enthusiasm—except he months back made the mistake of saying this in a group that included Grantaire, who said, “You know what I’m unenthusiastic about? Decrepit old rowboats. But if I was fucking <em>drowning</em>, Enj, you know how fast I’d throw myself on any unsteady hulk available?”</p><p>“Ah, so <em>that’s </em>how you got together,” Courf quipped. Had they been within arm’s distance, Enjolras might have swatted him.</p><p>The point though, sunk in.</p><p>People are drowning in this, every day, and Enjolras has it so good. He reminds himself regularly: keep remembering that the waters threaten. In extremis, perhaps, lies enthusiasm.</p><p>Hope, though? For the anxious and worn-down and superstitious, that’s hardest of all. It’s like whatever internal compartment used to fizz and quiver with hope now has its doors propped open so the hope can dissipate into the air, harmless, neutral. Not explosive.</p><p>In most circumstances he’s known, these prospects would not rally us. We would not champion this dry-toast candidacy like it was some kind of godsend. But of course, these circumstances are not most, and any glimmer of good feeling warrants amplification.</p><p>Who knows how the fuck to feel? We’ve been waiting too long, split in two minds, unsure and afraid—and just a little bit, in our slower-to-empty corners, ready to believe that this might actually work.</p><p>*</p><p>Grantaire insists upon voting in person. “You will not hand away your ballot to the mail-carrier!” he orders, in imitation of his mom, an appalled hand pressed to his chest. “You trust your vote to no person.”</p><p>Despite the decrease in polling places, the lines aren’t too bad this morning at the fire station where they are now assigned to cast their ballots. Behind them, a father plays “I Spy!” to keep a small child from fussing about the wait.</p><p>The physical stuff of voting has become so simple: paper thick enough to feel official but not luxurious, a cheap ball-point pen, printed ovals to fill.</p><p>A few voting stalls away, the child helps to bubble the father’s ballot.</p><p>“When I was a kid, I remember there were still the punch-card ballots,” Enjolras muses as they exit, stickers on their jackets. Sometimes his mom would let him punch the holes for her. “There was a whole process they had to talk you through, and this little metal poker for jabbing the ballot with, and it felt so momentous. Like it was a big deal if that punch didn’t go all the way through.”</p><p>“Which, history has proven—”</p><p>“Well, yeah, but I mean, not here. But sure.”</p><p>“Wait a sec.” Grantaire stops him with a hand on the arm, and draws him close for a selfie. Two stickered voters, Grantaire’s <em>Kelvin Hernandez for State Assembly</em> T-shirt, a Lugar de Votación sign just behind them. “Smile for my mom!”</p><p>“We’re wearing masks.”</p><p>“She’ll know!”</p><p>He sends the text as they keep walking toward home. “She knows they’re gonna fuck with us every way they can,” he says, eyes mostly on his phone. It’s impressive how easily he dodges other pedestrians as he texts. “This’ll make her feel—” Then he hits the signboard. “Fuck!”</p><p><em>“Civic duty done?”</em> it asks today, flattened on the ground in front of Grantaire’s old coffeeshop. “<em>Let go and let coffee.</em>”</p><p>“You okay?” Enjolras asks, but Grantaire is laughing.</p><p>“This goddamn sign. People just plow it down all day long.” He picks it up with familiar ease and sets it back on its feet. “We’d talk so much shit about the assholes who couldn’t even be bothered to watch where they’re going.”</p><p>“Can I get you a coffee?”</p><p>“Sure.”</p><p>They take them to go (of course; everything’s to go now) and sit in the park, where it’s brisk but sunny and they have a bench to themselves so they can unwind for a few.</p><p>Or check every possible election update and app they have on their phone.</p><p>“Really?” Grantaire asks, stretching out to better sun himself. He’s started shaving again; the sunlight catches in the stubble along his jaw.</p><p>“Just checking on Kelvin.”</p><p>“Checking what?” Other than internal polling, there’s not much data on the state assembly races. Nothing new is coming out today.</p><p>“How he’s doing?”</p><p>Grantaire tilts his head like this is odd. “Like, you’re texting him? About his emotional state?”</p><p>Enjolras clicks send. “Yeah.” He’s their friend. This seems like a reasonable thing for a friend to do.</p><p>Behind Grantaire, a kid is chasing her sister across the grass. At their approach, dozens of songbirds soar out of a tree.</p><p>“That’s nice of you.”</p><p>“You say it like there’s a but.”</p><p>“It’s just new, is the but.”</p><p>“It’s a long day ahead,” Enjolras says, trying to discreetly scroll through his other chat histories. Surely he texts his friends to check in on them. Courf does it to <em>him</em> all the time. But the evidence is sparse. His outgoing message history definitely leans toward the practical. But god, to be shouldering all this <em>and </em>your own race? He envies Kelvin not a whit. His whole body’s restless.</p><p>“Now what do we do with ourselves?”</p><p>He’s written two speeches for tomorrow night—well, three, plus a catalogue of additions and variations to be tacked in or purged as the situations warrant—well, also a couple for Kelvin, but those were pretty easy. It’s the two main Lamarque speeches that are the big ones.</p><p>Lamarque is less sanguine than Enjolras has ever seen. She does not play this game by its bloodless rules. She does not hug men who would gladly watch her constituents burn.</p><p>“I honestly don’t know what I’ll do,” she said abruptly at the start of a call last week. “Of course I’ll say the right things. Of course I can spin even the absolute worst. But, should I? Can I? If...”</p><p>“That’s why we need you,” said Chida. “Because if it comes to that, <em>should </em>won’t matter.”</p><p>The first drafts were already waiting in Lamarque’s email. “So I tell the lies.”</p><p>“No!” It’s a good thing Enjolras has put in enough years that he can openly contradict his boss without her thinking he’s an insolent asshole. She did stare him down. “Some. Only a little bit. Mostly you have to remind people that there’s going to be a tomorrow, and another one after that.”</p><p>From his pristine white-walled apartment in D.C., Darren chimed in: “Why it’s got to be you, Senator, is you’re not a person who instills false hope. You’re not in cahoots with them. The desperate are going to need to see you holding the line against despair.”</p><p>The desperate, he said.</p><p>All that’s getting us through, people keep saying, is this prospect of change, like a breaking in the storm clouds. And if the piled clouds only surge more thickly gray, the warmth and light further blockaded, who won’t be desperate?</p><p>Holy fuck, in the face of such despair, we’ll need some live embers of human love and fury to keep us going, to see us through. Because, when you’re watching fascism rise around you, it doesn’t matter how much else is going well. You’ve read this story before. Powerless. They feel powerless, the good people, and every move is fraught with dangers, and disaster lurks around every bend—but they fight. They love people, or the idea of people. They remember the tomorrows.</p><p>Fascist regimes die. They have. They will. They do.</p><p>It’s awfully nice, though, when we get to live a life that transcends the existential battles of our time. It makes it feel, at least for a few chapters’ worth, like our lives are actually our own.</p><p>From the other end of the park bench, arm extended down its back to just touch Enjolras’s shoulder, Grantaire is laughing at what must be a very distant look in his aspect. “How d’ya feel about my chances of getting you to take a day off?” His eyes drift across Enjolras’s face, landing on his lips. Lower, he asks, “Get a little stoned...”</p><p>Enjolras laughs at the plaintive tone.</p><p>“Yeah, no, didn’t think it was looking great. Cool. Well, you do you, worrier.”</p><p>“Will do.” The joke’s not that there’s reason to worry—because of course there is so much reason to worry. The joke is that they process worry so differently, and that when the day is nice and the dangers are so far from their control, it’s okay to pretend for a moment that the difference between worrying and not worrying means a single miniscule thing.</p><p>*</p><p>Senator Lamarque publicly endorsed Kelvin Hernandez’s run for the state legislature months ago. It’s the great interview she gave him that picked up traction online: her tone steely and gaze measured but affectionate as she interrogated him.</p><p>
  <em>“Are you ready for the state house?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Not yet.” Laughing in his characteristically disarming manner, Kelvin sits. “But I’ll figure it out.” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“We’re in the midst of a pandemic and a cataclysmic economic crisis, Councilman. Can we really afford to change horses mid-stream?”</em>
</p><p><em>“With utmost respect, Senator, when our current horse seems content to remain mid-stream indefinitely, I believe that we can’t afford </em>not <em>to try the change.”</em></p><p>
  <em>“And why you?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I wasn’t always a city boy. I’ve spent my whole life in this state; I’ve lived in farming communities and college towns, I worked an assembly line for a couple years before I went back to school and got my law degree. I grew up on food stamps, and now many of my colleagues—and some of my friends—are literal millionaires. What I’m saying is, I’ve seen the people of our state from enough angles to know that most of us want the same things.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I’ve seen the failures of our liberalism. We need more. We need solutions that don’t pit farmers against environmentalists, or low-income folks against new immigrants. We need leaders who lift us out of the mud—well, steer us out of the stream first, to get back to your metaphor, then lead us up from the mud toward the bigger goals, the ones that unify us.”</em>
</p><p>The horse metaphor was a true gift. Could Lamarque have possibly known, going in, that Kelvin Hernandez would feel compelled to pick up invisible reins—like Psy, like Lil Nas X—and ride that phantom horse out of the phantom stream? The memes, counter to all Enjolras’s expectations, swept the internet. Though the initial splash was indiscriminate and goofy, over time, the animated-gif posts picked up comment threads with surprising substance.</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>This guy’s actually fuckin’ awesome. Check his plan for homelessness! Wish I was in his district.</p>
</blockquote><blockquote>
  <p>That’s my councilman! He pushed through more than 1k units of affordable housing and a huge green jobs training and placement program in the last 6 yrs.</p>
</blockquote><blockquote>
  <p>I’m too young to vote, but I’ll vote for him next time!</p>
</blockquote><blockquote>
  <p>no one:</p>
  <p>me: Hernandez is such a nerd!!!</p>
  <p>me: I love himmmm.</p>
  <p>me: did you hear Hz’s talk about cash bail?!?</p>
  <p>me: or public schools, low-cost housing, jobs training, decriminalization, treatment, sanctuary...</p>
  <p>me: my only regret is that I have but one vote to give to Kelvin Hernandez</p>
</blockquote><p>He’s still an underdog—but now the headlines have shifted from “Long Shot” to “Dark Horse?”</p><p>*</p><p>They’re walking back home when Enjolras’s phone buzzes.</p><p><strong>Hernandez: </strong>Perfect, thanks for asking</p><p><strong>Hernandez: </strong>Zero stress</p><p><strong>Hernandez: </strong>Do you think 30 hours of hibernation would hurt my chances?</p><p>His social feeds show a packed day already with a TV spot on the morning news, a call with canvassers, a virtual meet-and-greet with seniors, and a parking-lot rally outside a locally celebrated taco truck. Someone there brought him a cowboy hat, it looks like, and he’s really leaning into this vaquero thing, giving a little flick to the brim when he thanks his socially-scattered audience. Who knew mild-mannered Hernandez was such a showman?</p><p>He’s apparently just leaving the taco truck appearance, if Enjolras is reading the timing right.</p><p><strong>Enjolras: </strong>You get to eat anything?</p><p><strong>Hernandez: </strong>Carnitas! Love that place</p><p><strong>Hernandez: </strong>Actually got to finish eating now before we get to the farmers market</p><p><strong>Enjolras: </strong>Stay strong!</p><p>Grantaire’s arm steers him down the street while he texts. “Whaddya think? Think he might actually have a shot?”</p><p><strong>Enjolras: </strong>R says you were made for this</p><p>“He better be careful with those tacos,” Grantaire says, glancing down.</p><p><strong>Enjolras: </strong>And he says keep the salsa off your tie</p><p><strong>Hernandez: </strong>Thanks, guys</p><p><strong>Enjolras: </strong>30 hours!</p><p>Already mentally settling into the warren of electronics that awaits him at home, Enjolras knows that when he’s not drafting last-second missives for the senator, he’ll spend the bulk of those hours glued to his screens, refreshing and narrowing and revising his searches, worrying out possibilities from the limited data available.</p><p>It’s what he needs to do.</p><p>Of course it’s fucking stupid, but that’s how superstition works. For Enjolras, letting go means giving in to the fear of what might be—and doing every single ridiculous thing within his power to prevent it so becoming.</p><p>“Go on ahead,” Grantaire says when they get to their corner. “I’ll meet you up there in a few. Gonna get us some sustenance for the long haul.”</p><p>Enjolras kisses his rough cheek. “See you there.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Title from <a href="https://poets.org/poem/love-not-all-sonnet-xxx">Sonnet XXX (“Love is not all”)</a> by Edna St. Vincent Millay.</p><p>More soon.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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